


Frenchy Was The Only Good Character Anyway

by galaxysoup



Category: Ten Inch Hero
Genre: Epilogue, F/M, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:59:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1356766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galaxysoup/pseuds/galaxysoup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tish is damned if she’s going to be the Danny Zuko in this relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frenchy Was The Only Good Character Anyway

**Author's Note:**

> So then this happened? This morning has not been under my control. Whatever, I thought this was a cute movie except for one tiny part at the very end, so I decided to try and fix it.

The first time Priestly walks into the shop without his mohawk and stupidly elaborate sideburns and million piercings, Tish stops and stares. She can’t help it. Not only because she now knows what his natural haircolor is (kind of light brown-dark blonde), but because without all the crap on his face Priestly is actually kind of hot. Like, _male-model_ hot. 

She still gives him a hard time before agreeing to dinner, of course, because that’s what she _does_ , but for the rest of the day she keeps glancing over and getting distracted. Holy Jesus, she had no idea that facial hair could hide devastating cheekbones so well. And that _mouth_ \- 

Well. Anyway. Distracted. In her defense, Piper keeps dropping her paintbrushes and Jen does so many double-takes that by the end of the day she’s rubbing her neck and grimacing, so it’s not like she’s the only one. Even Trucker looks amused.

And then Priestly comes in the next day in the same getup.

And the day after that.

He wears it on their first date, in which he is such a textbook gentleman that Tish is actively unnerved. Gone are the snarky one-liners, the off-topic rants, and the teasing. He doesn’t take her to a bar or a concert or a tattoo parlor, which frankly would have all been in character. Instead, they go to a nice Italian joint. He pulls her chair out for her and orders _wine_.

He gets carded, because Clean-Cut Priestly looks like jailbait. There’s a particularly funny moment when the waiter looks from the picture on the driver’s license (five-inch blue mohawk and enough piercings that they reflected the camera’s flash) to the guy sitting in front of him (chinos, neat hair, and a pressed light blue button-down) and appears to question his sense of reality, but then it passes. The rest of the date is… nice. Normal. Kind of boring and like twenty other dates that Tish has been on.

By the time Trucker and Zo’s wedding rolls around, Tish is starting to freak out. The Priestly she used to know appears to be gone, taking his personality and his sense of style with him. The one she’s got now is a nice guy, sure, and apparently more comfortable with showing his vulnerable side - which, granted, could be a side-effect of no longer having his expressions hidden behind six pounds of makeup and shrapnel. And Priestly _before_ had been nice - sweet, even, when the situation called for it - but it had been tempered by the rest of him. It hadn’t been _unnerving_.

She walks in one morning to find that Piper’s almost done adding them all to the bottom of the mural she’s painting on the shop’s back wall, and she loses it.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she snaps. “At least put Priestly in his kilt. We look like a damn Abercrombie ad.”

“He wasn’t... wearing it… I’ll see what I can do,” Piper says, goggling at her.

Priestly loves his kilt. Priestly loves his stupid technicolor hair, or he wouldn’t spend what must be hours on it every morning, and the same goes for the weirdly precise facial hair. He’d tricked Jen into talking to Fuzzy by disguising him as something non-threatening long enough for her to let her guard down, and Tish had thought that he was pulling the same trick on her.

But what if this is it? What if he’s going to stick with it? He’d gotten so angry with Jen for judging Fuzzy based on his appearance. Well, not angry exactly. Hurt. He’d been hurt. And if Priestly actually means this transformation, that’s one thing. Go him, seize the day, express yourself, all that crap. But what if he’s doing it just for her?

It makes her feel… guilty. She likes the power she has over men, freaking _revels_ in it sometimes after a hard day, but power over someone who won’t even fight back is… well, it makes her uneasy. It’s like the end of ‘Grease’, when Sandy changes herself just to please Danny.

Tish _hates_ ‘Grease’. It’s idiotic and slut-shamey and she refuses to be Danny Goddamn Zuko when it’s clear that she should really be Frenchy.

That night, after Priestly has taken her to dinner and the movies (a rom-com, he took her to a freaking _rom-com_ without a single snarky comment, there is only so much she can take), she puts Plan One into action.

“Let’s go back to your place,” she says, pressing her boobs against his arm. 

He swallows. “Uh, it’s not really ready yet…”

She busts out the sideways-through-the-eyelashes look. He folds like a badly-gelled mohawk, and she has to fight to keep from doing a victory fist pump, because if there is one thing Tish is good at it’s figuring out someone’s life by going through their stuff while they sleep. She would have been _aces_ as a femme fatale spy, let’s just face it.

She ignores the apartment when they get there, focusing all her attention on Priestly instead. There will be time to snoop later. For now, there’s shoving him back onto the bed and climbing on top of him and doing her level best to make sure he’s knocked out for the rest of the night. And Tish’s level best is very, very good.

Several hours later, Priestly’s flat on his stomach, snoring and looking like he got hit by a sex truck. Tish eases out from underneath his arm (thank God he’s at least still got his tattoos, she doesn’t know what would happen to her sense of reality if they disappeared too) and starts her investigation. 

She begins with the closet, which is mostly empty. Priestly’s eleven million inappropriate t-shirts and torn flannel shirts are nowhere to be seen. Even his combat boots are gone. In their place are several garbage bags stuffed into the bottom on the closet, and three sets of lonely identical chinos-and-blue-button-downs hanging from hangers. There’s also a stack of framed band posters held together with string that he must have taken down at some point, since the walls of his apartment are mostly bare.

Tish swallows hard. At least he hasn’t actually gotten rid of all his old stuff yet. Still, this doesn’t look too good.

She continues on into the bathroom, which is even worse. All of Priestly’s bewildering array of hair-care products are piled up in the bathroom trashcan, which looks ready to collapse under the strain. There’s a stack of catalogs next to the sink that have been flipped through and annotated. She picks up a J Crew one and opens it to a random page, where Priestly has circled some kid’s torso and scrawled ‘douchey button-down: always tucked in’ in the margin. She keeps flipping through it, skimming over comments like ‘pastel everything’ and ‘no facial hair at all’.

The rest of the catalogs are all the same, except for one page at the end of the last one, where Priestly had apparently snapped for a moment. It says ‘FUCK THIS COLLEGE SHIT’ in big, despairing Sharpie, and then the page after that is a resigned analysis of preppy footwear. A tiny ‘these are not good for kicking’ in the bottom corner is the only sign that he’s not totally on-board with his research.

Well, that tears it. It’s time for Plan Two.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next morning Tish prods Priestly out of bed just in time for him to make it to work without being late, and stretches languorously (and nakedly) to short-circuit his higher reasoning powers. “Go on without me. Is it okay if I use your shower?”

He recovers himself long enough to bolt for the bathroom and hide his catalog collection, and then he leaves her to her work.

The first thing she does is gleefully empty out those trash bags of clothing all over his bedroom floor. His stuff is too big for her, of course, but she takes the string off the posters and it works pretty well to hold the cargo pants up. The combat boots are going to be really hard to walk in, but as long as she laces them tightly and doesn’t try to go too fast she should be okay. 

His ‘Surf Naked’ shirt comes next. Her first impulse is to grab a pair of scissors and crop the hell out of it, but she forces herself to leave it be, baggy and shapeless as it is. She ties one of his flannel shirts around her waist, under the hem of the t-shirt, and it’s reasonably comfortable.

Next, hair and makeup. She has no idea what goes into creating a mohawk and she doesn’t have time for dye, and that stymies her for a moment. In the end, she steals rubber bands from the kitchen and puts her hair into a million tiny twisted buns. She has no idea if it’s a ‘punk’ hairdo, but at least it looks wildly different. Those rubber bands are going to be a bitch to get out without tangling her hair, but whatever. She’s committed now.

She digs his hair care stuff out of the trash, lining it up on the edge of the sink until she unearths the eyeliner. She doesn’t have a good shade of lipstick to go with it, which is a shame, but so it goes. It looks okay on its own.

The final step is the hardest. She has to search through most of his cabinets until she finds the jewelry box, but she’d been betting that he’d have a harder time getting rid of the more expensive stuff. And, just as she’d suspected, he _does_ have a few fake piercings - some of his old ones had moved around way too much to be permanent. She finds two rings, washes them, and fits them onto her lower lip. They pinch a little, but she can take it. 

A little bit of artwork up and down her arms and the side of her neck with a Sharpie, and she’s ready to go. Now all she has to do is walk to work and go in through the front door looking like this. _Oh God._

No, she can do it. _Priestly_ did it, albeit a reversed ‘it’, and she’s not going to let him out-macho her, so there. She makes her way to work, face burning as people stop to look at her, and has to take a second at the corner to hyperventilate.

“Go big or go home,” she reminds herself, and slams through the front door.

“Morning, bitches!”

“ _Tish?!?”_ Jen gasps, shocked. Piper drops an entire tray of something. Zo laughs delightedly, clapping her hands.

Tish only has eyes for Priestly, who’s staring at her openmouthed and looks to be in danger of accidentally setting himself on fire at the grill. She swaggers behind the counter and slouches against the register, propping one boot up on the trashcan.

Priestly is still staring.

“What?” Tish says, cocking her head insolently. “You changed yourself for me, I can’t do the same?”

He grins, and it’s _finally_ his old smile, the one that lights up his whole stupid face and isn’t the tentative version he’s been sporting for the last few weeks. “Don’t scuff my boots.”

“Please, it would improve them,” Tish scoffs.

He laughs. “And I want that shirt back, it’s one of my favorites.”

“Deal,” Tish says, grinning.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next day Priestly comes in with green hair and his kilt and most of his old piercings back in place. Tish is wearing a short skirt and heels and one of her most revealing tank tops.

They fistbump and then make out in the storeroom. It’s a good day.


End file.
